Tomorrow’s Downtown Comes Into View

Amid praise for a ​“gutsy” scaling down of new parking, developer Carter Winstanley’s proposed new ten-story bioscience tower at 101 College St. sailed through its site plan review approval.

The City Plan Commission granted the approval Wednesday night after an extensive look at how the next skyscraper will transform the Downtown landscape.

The tower will mirror his 100 College Street Alexion building across the street and feature a monumental set of steps up to a tree-canopied public plaza and cafe at Temple Street and MLK Jr. Boulevard.

There were only a a few commissioners’ quibbles about the number of bike racks, showers, and how the configuration of the vehicular entrance/exit on MLK Boulevard might be improved to enhance pedestrian safety.

The unanimous 4 – 0 commissioners’ vote to approve the site plan, the details of which you can view here, occurred via a webinar conducted on the Zoom teleconferencing platform.

The gathering was chaired by the commission chair Ed Mattison and hosted by City Plan Deputy Director Jenna Montesano and attended by 19 presenters and participants.

Earlier this month the Board of Alders unanimously approved a public land sale and underlying zoning updates designed to enable the development of the new 10-story, 500,000 square-foot bioscience lab and office tower to be built atop the former Route 34 Connector.

The property is an 1.75-acre parcel bounded by College Street, South Frontage Road, Temple Street, and M.L.K., Jr. Boulevard. It constitutes the second major installment on the complex Downtown Crossing project, which seeks to knit together the medical district, the Hill neighborhood, and Downtown.

The property is owned by Massachusetts-based developer Winstanley who made the presentation along with architect John Martin, traffic engineer Ted DeSantos, and attorney Carolyn Kone.

Winstanley said that while there’s a ​“a great deal of uncertainty in the market place” due to Covid-19, ​“our goal is to be in the ground by mid to late August.”

He called the schedule ambitious but ​“it’s important to help the community to lead us out of the pandemic.”

If all goes well, there would be approximately a two-year construction schedule, with November 2022 as the opening date, he added.

Engineer DeSantos said every effort is going to be made to have at least one lane of traffic open on both M.L.K. Jr. Boulevard and South Front Street throughout the construction phases.

The main interior features of the proposed building are an airy two-story laboratory incubator space (the two levels connected by a curving stairway) for start-up and mid-stage bioscience companies on the South Frontage side,

There will also be conference rooms and a classroom (to be made available to city science students) and a cafe on the northeast section that will connect the inside of the building with an outside plaza. The plaza will open to the public during business hours.

That cafe is to be located at the end of a long pedestrian walkway on the north-facing side that is intended to be used by folks entering the building at its main ingress, on College Street, so that pedestrians will travel the long block inside, on the level, instead of using the sidewalks with their steep grades along the heavily trafficked M.L.K. Jr. Boulevard and South Frontage Street.

The north facade of the building will be all glass, and the other three facades will show terracotta and metal panels designed to allow light to enter.

The whole treatment, said architect John Martin, is to create an ​“active public face, with transparency” in keeping with the requirements of the BD‑3 zoning.

Commissioners Ed Mattison, Leslie Radcliffe and Adam Marchand asked about parking, bicycle, and traffic circulation issues.

Winstanley said initial planning for the building included considering a huge garage similar to the one under 100 College. But the plan has evolved in response to the growing city walk-to-work and bike culture, said Winstanley.

The result is that the two-level underground garage, beneath the plaza on the east side of the building, will have space for only 117 cars on site. There is an 80-year contract with New Haven Parking Authority for 500 additional spaces at nearby off-site garages.

“I’m surprised you have only 117 parking spaces,” said Mattison. He called that ​“gutsy” in a building that may ultimately have 1,000 people working in it.

Winstanley credited his team’s ongoing conversation with city officials and the community management teams with the plan evolving to limit parking in order to have the plaza that is what he called inclusive and a ​“maximizing of public space.”

“We are under-parked for sure,” said Winstanley. But he added that in the ten years since he built 100 College they’ve seen more and more tenants living in New Haven and biking, walking, and training to work. He thinks many of the future tenants of 101 College will fit that bill.

Then he added that if you stand on the corner of Temple, which in a third phase of the Downtown Crossing Project, will connect to the medical district, you can see the train station, now that the Church Street South buildings have been razed.

He said that he hopes the future development of Church Street South site will include a walkway directly to his buildings.

The design includes 108 bike racks, 72 in the second or mezzanine level of the small underground garage and 36 outside distributed at both east and west ends of the building, along with showers throughout the building — - not for the public but associated with the private tenants’ premises.

Most vehicular traffic and all vans and trucks will enter under the building through east and west flowing dedicated tunneling lanes on the south side. Marchand and Radcliffe expressed concern about the exit/entrance for cars, situated midway in the building on M.L.K. Jr. Boulevard.

“I worry about traffic moving quickly. How will vehicles see pedestrians?” asked Marchand.

DeSantos responded that with only 117 spots there well may not be a lot of entering and exiting on MLK. But the sight lines are good, he asserted.

Moreover, the building features a wall of vegetation from the midway point of the block to Temple that will help move pedestrians and be more visible to cars entering and leaving, he added.

Martin also pointed out that with a level interior passageway along the north side of the building, intended to attract walkers there instead of the graded sidewalk, ​“the sidewalk, we hope, will not be busy.”

Radcliffe pointed out that the site plan calls for cars leaving the garage onto MLK Boulevard to do so from a right interior lane while cars entering from MLK cross in front of them and enter to their left.

“If I’m exiting from the right hand side to go left (the westward direction of traffic on the one-way MLK), it’s not natural to ease into traffic” she said.

DeSantos replied that he and the city’s Transportation, Traffic & Parking deliberated this issue at length. They have ended up with the configuration in part because they ​“wanted a pedestrian environment.”

“I think yellow striped lines will help solve that,” Radcliffe replied, and DeSantos said he and his team would consider that. ​“That’s reasonable.”

In addition to the unanimous approval for the site plan, commissioners addressed two other related issues.

Attorney Kone said the 101 College plan is also before the city’s Development Commission. It needs a thumbs-up from the commissioners that the building and site plan’s landscaping, quality of design and materials, parking, curb cuts, and other such matters are in consonance with the Downtown Municipal Development Plan.

Commissioners agreed on that, which required a separate 4 – 0 unanimous vote.

They also approved in principal, in a separate unanimous vote, the building of an aerial pedestrian bridge across South Frontage from 100 College to 333 Cedar Street, one of the buildings on Yale’s old medical campus. A vote was required because the area in question, 333 Cedar, is in previously approved planned development unit or PDU.

When Marchand clarified that the bridge itself would likely come back to the commission for site plan and to the buildings department for details, commissioners voted unanimously to permit the pedestrian bridge, which was envisioned in the original PDU, and which feature already exists at other locations in the medical district.

Many other items on the agenda, due to time constraints in a meeting that lasted nearly four hours, were shifted to the commission’s next meeting, to be convened on Aug. 5.